What are the top 5 ways to manage my leads?

Driving leads is nice but without a good way to manage them, working them can be difficult. Proper lead nurturing can bring better benefits than just driving leads can.

What is lead nurturing? According to, startwithalead.com, it’s “The secret to successful lead generation, and in turn marketing, in the business-to-business space today is process. This process, that converts more inquiries into qualified leads and qualified leads into sales, is called lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful dialog with viable prospects regardless of their timing to buy.”

Given lead nuturing’s importance, here are my 5 ways to manage them effectively:

Learn your audience.

Do you find that certain types of prospects require more time? What types are they? Older, younger, different educations, moving from certain zip codes? Do you have the reporting to show you that college educated people require more follow ups or always seem to be in a hurry? Is it true that most people around 36 years old begin their mid life crisis? Most definitively YES. These types of metrics can allow you to target how you respond or how you handle certain leads. It’s one thing to just fire off an email within 2 hours (statistics show that most web leads are dead or on life support after 48 hours) and then move onto the next one but its another thing to try to understand your prospect.

If you have had an interaction with your prospect try to get as much information as you can

Having more information about a prospect (looking for washer/dryer, wants a patio) can help keep your staff excited about them. 4% of all email leads are converted industry wide so it sure can get frustrating.

Learn how to spot the bad ones.

How long do you hold onto leads? When is enough enough? Do leads at a certain time of day (ie. late at night) end up rejected more than not?

Don’t be afraid sometimes to back off your lead driving efforts and give every existing lead your full attention.

Call, send a letter, if you’ve sent 3 emails from your account send another from someone else’s. (“I couldn’t help but notice that you haven’t responded”) Spend some time getting to know what your current crop of prospects are telling you. You might learn a lot.

Measure everything you do.

How quickly do properties respond? What are they saying? How many follow ups is each lead getting? What times of day are more leads coming in? (Are you staffed appropriately at that time?)
Talking about managing leads is a topic I would consider “Boring but important”. You cannot work your leads effectively if you have a disorganized method of managing them. Once you solve the organization problem are you analyzing and executing them as best as you can? Are you putting the best effort into every lead knowing that the next one could be your next move in? Sometimes the answers lie within.